[12P.14] The Catalina Sky Survey for NEOs

S Larson, J Brownlee, C Hergenrother, T Spahr (LPL/Univ. Arizona)

We are bringing into operation a wide-field near-earth
object detection system at the Catalina Observatory north of
Tucson. A Lockheed 4k x 4k CCD has replaced the plate holder
in the 42/68 cm Schmidt telescope providing an 8.3 square
degree field with 2.5 arcsec pixels. Telescope pointing,
guiding and sequencing is under computer control. The data
acquisition and reduction is carried out with a networked
"farm" of 6 computers running the Linux OS. CCD control is
through IRAF/ICE, and most image reduction is carried out in
the IRAF environment. Stationary background objects are
mostly eliminated by differencing average and median coadded
images from multiple "visits" to the same field. Candidate
objects are flagged from the list of remaining objects by
velocity matching and visually checked before reporting to
the Minor Planet Center. We will show sample images and
demonstration of the reduction algorithm.

This work has been supported by NASA Planetary Astronomy
Program grant NAG5-4049